Kripkenstein

Davidson's later philosophy of language has been inspired by Wittgenstein's Investigations, but Davidson by no means sympathizes with the sceptical problem and solution Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein. Davidson criticizes the sceptical argument for relying on the rule-following conception of meaning, which is, for him, a highly problematic view. He also casts doubt on the plausibility of the sceptical solution as unjustifiably bringing in shared practices of a speech community. According to Davidson, it is rather success in mutual interpretation that explains success in the practice of meaning something by an utterance. I will argue that Davidson's objections to the sceptical problem and solution are misplaced as they rely on a misconstrual of Kripke's Wittgenstein's view. I will also argue that Davidson's alternative solution to the sceptical problem is implausible, since it fails to block the route to the sceptical problem. I will then offer a problematic trilemma for Davidson.

This paper presents a new case, through which we can think and teach about the so-called Wittgenstein’s paradox. When it was formulated by Saul Kripke almost 50 years ago, it relied on predominantly abstract cases of the paradox – which went to show that not even some idealised mathematicians are safe from the posed problem. However, I present a concrete case that conveys more naturally just how relevant the paradox really is for everyday life.

This thesis is a critical and comparative study of four commentators on the later Wittgenstein's rule following considerations. As such its primary aim is exegetical, and ultimately the thesis seeks to arrive at an enriched understanding of Wittgenstein's work through the distillation of the four commentators into what, it is hoped, can be said to approach a definitive interpretation, freed of their individual frailties.

The thesis commences by explicating the position of Kripke's Wittgenstein. He draws our attention to the 'sceptical problem' of how we are to resolve the apparently paradoxical situation that whilst we seem to use language meaningfully, there is no fact about us that constitutes our meaning one thing as opposed to something else, and consequently the possibility of our actually meaning anything seems to evaporate. Kripke interprets Wittgenstein as accepting the validity of the sceptical problem, but seeking to establish that the force of the problem is radically diminished because the justification which it has shown to be unobtainable is actually unnecessary for rule following to take place.

McDowell tries to show that Kripke is mistaken when he views Wittgenstein as endorsing scepticism in this way, because he sees Kripke as failing to appreciate a section of Philosophical Investigations which suggests that one ought to reject the sceptical paradox by correcting the misunderstanding which gives rise to it. McDowell reads Wittgenstein's claim as being that we mistakenly think we are caught in a dilemma which requires us either to endorse the sceptical paradox or to subscribe to a mythological picture of rule following; whereas, so the thought goes, we must reject the entire dilemma.

Although McDowell's criticism of Kripke is essentially correct, he is motivated to that criticism by an incorrect reading of Wittgenstein. Central to this misinterpretation is his failure to note Wittgenstein's belief that universal scepticism is nonsensical. Winch does much to flesh out the nature of Wittgenstein's claim here, although he makes the mistake of attributing to Kripke that position which the latter finds in Philosophical Investigations. Despite inheriting this error from Winch, Diamond nonetheless improves on his attempt to characterize the shortcomings of Kripke's reading as an interpretation of Wittgenstein, enabling the thesis to reach a conclusion about Wittgenstein's understanding of rule following.

Herz des Aufsatzes ist eine an der "default & challenge"-Konzeption der Rechtfertigung angelehnte Lesart der skeptischen Lösung des Regelfolgenproblems. Ich argumentiere, dass damit einige vermeintliche Probleme der skeptischen Lösung ausgeräumt werden können.

The starting point for this paper is the acceptance of Kripke’s sceptic’s case for scepticism about semantic notions: ‘There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word.’ (Kripke 1982: 55). The thesis is restated, shown to be logically coherent, and taken as an invitation to provide an explanation of linguistic phenomena that does not make use of semantic relationships. The criteria of adequacy for such an account are that it provide some insight into the phenomena that the notions of meaning and reference were traditionally evoked to explain, for instance the phenomenon of communication and certain correlations between the linguistic and non-linguistic environments. It is claimed that the alternative picture of linguistic phenomena presented by Kripke’s sceptic can fruitfully be seen as a variety of inferential role account, but as an inferential role alternative to an account of meaning, not an alternative account of meaning, for inferential role accounts of meaning just as surely fall pray to the sceptical argument as truth-conditional rivals. Finally, certain objections to the coherence of semantic scepticism are considered and shown not to apply to the form scepticism takes here.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the normativity of meaning was thought to be more-or-less 'incontestable.' But in the last 25 years, many philosophers of mind and language have contested it in several seemingly different ways. This, however, is somewhat illusory. There is an unappreciated commonality among most anti-normativist arguments, and this commonality, I argue, poses a problem for anti-normativism. The result, however, is not a wholesale rejection of anti-normativism. Rather, an insight from the anti-normativist position can be harnessed to reveal an unappreciated position in the normativity of meaning debate.

Recently, two new portrayals of Kripke's Wittgenstein (KW) have emerged. Both understand KW as targeting the Tractarian picture of semantic fact as a speaker's mental representation of the truth-conditions of the sentences he uses. According to the fac-tualist interpretation, KW holds that meaning ascriptions are legitimate descriptions because semantic facts are not entities that explain people's linguistic behavior. The second, Alex Miller's non-standard non-factualist interpretation, sees KW as claiming that because no fact can explain our linguistic behavior, meaning ascriptions express a speaker's attitudes towards his interlocutors rather than stating what they mean. This paper advances the minimal factualist interpretation by elaborating two points: that Miller's reading of the skeptical argument contradicts semantic non-factualism; and that KW's view of meaning is based on a primitivist rendition of the skeptic's insight that nothing justifies our use of language, which allows him to assert that semantic facts exist simply because we ordinarily say so.

This draft chapter of my forthcoming 'Liberatory philosophy' comprises my critical discussion of the epic exegetical struggle around PI 201f., and my own ‘resolute’ reading of this, the climactic moment in the so-called ‘rule-following considerations’. I advance a reading of these passages of PI which serves to throw into question what one can be stably wanting to mean if one wants to purvey a ‘constitutive’ scepticism a la Kripke’s Wittgenstein (‘Kripkenstein’). For, if one’s present meanings are thrown into doubt (as Kripke seems to claim), then the doubts that one raises (in the present) about the past are also thrown into doubt. But this deprives one of the resources needed even to state the constitutive scepticism. Reluctantly, one is driven to conclude that Kripke has not, so far as one can tell, succeeded in assigning any stable meaning to his central ‘claims’ in his reading of Wittgenstein. In this regard, Kripkean scepticism is even worse off than Cartesian scepticism. It need not trouble us, because ‘it’ fails even to exist. Kripke’s Wittgenstein evinces merely a fantasy of ‘total’ freedom, rather than anything coherent. It is freedom as mere license; it is the ‘freedom’ of nonsense without due attention: The purveyor of nonsense is free to ‘say’ whatever they want; but, sadly, they don’t actually succeed in saying anything at all.
        So none of what I establish in this chapter involves the imposition of a constraint, any more than one is ‘constrained’ when one is asked to speak a natural language that one’s hearer is capable of comprehending, or than when one is asked to talk sense. It is rather about committing to using words in one way or another. Rather than permanently hovering. Kripke merely hovers. It is as if he wants to stay permanently in the state of the merely exposed grammatical form discussed in the previous chapter, the state of mere interpretation that is diagnosed in 198 and 201. But we saw in the previous chapter how remaining thus permanently in a state of possibility rather than actuality is precisely not to act, precisely not to follow (aka act from) a rule. And Kripke’s discussion was supposed, precisely, to concern: rule-following. Thus that discussion fails.
For the very idea of doubting that one’s words mean anything, on the basis of doubting whether they may have meant something usual rather than something unusual at some point in the past, just does not amount to anything.

The received view of Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is that it fails as an interpretation because, inter alia, it ignores or overlooks what Wittgenstein has to say in the second paragraph of Philosophical Investigations 201. In this paper, I demonstrate that the paragraph in question is in fact fully accommodated within Kripke's reading, and cannot therefore be reasonably utilised to object to it.

In part one I characterise the objection; in part two I explain why it fails; in part three I suggest why commentators might have been motivated to offer it; and in part four I claim that two commentators who have offered it also imply otherwise.

In this paper, I present a game-theoretic solution to the rule-following paradox in terms of what I will call basic constitutive practices. The structure of such a practice P constitutes what it is to take part in P by defining the correctness conditions of our most basic concepts as those actions that lie on the correlated equilibrium of P itself. Accordingly, an agent S meant addition by his use of the term ‘+’ because S is taking part in a basic constitutive practice of adding where quus-like answers are ruled out by not lying on the equilibrium. The resulting picture of language will preserve the objectivity and correctness conditions of meaning, all the while providing room for the community as a whole to make a mistake. I also argue that by accepting the account presented, we have a strong reason to reject the idea that language is rule-governed.

Saul Kripke's (1982) sceptical take on Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox challenges us to find facts that can justify one interpretation of a symbol's past use over another. While Ruth Millikan (1990) has answered this challenge by appealing to biological purposes, her answer has been criticized for failing to account for the normativity of rules like addition, which require explicit representations. In this paper, I offer a defense of Millikan. I claim that we can explain how we build intentions to add from the content of core cognition modules like the approximate number system, and argue that Millikan's answer is better equipped to explain the origins of rules than communitarian approaches like that endorsed by Kusch (2006). I then explore the worth of pluralism about rules and try to find common ground between expressed and unexpressed rules in terms of expectation on how the world is supposed to behave.

According to the standard interpretation of position about the meaning that Kripke attributes to
Wittgenstein in his study Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripkenstein advocates skepticism
about the meaning facts, and semantic antirealism – the view that sentences of semantic discourse
have assertability conditions instead of truth conditions. The aim of this paper is to show that the standard
interpretation of the skeptical solution is not accurate because the sceptical conclusion implies only that
Kripkenstein doubts the existence of philosophical super-facts which uniquely determine the truth conditions
that the speaker has in mind when he utters a certain sentence, but not the existence of facts about
meaning altogether.

Wittgenstein (W) is for me easily the most brilliant thinker on human behavior and this is his last work and crowning achievement. It belongs to his third and final period, yet it is not only his most basic work (since it shows that all behavior is an extension of innate true-only axioms and that our conscious ratiocination is but icing on unconscious machinations), but as Daniele Moyal-Sharrock has recently noted, is a radical new epistemology and the foundation for all description of animal behavior, revealing how the mind works and indeed must work. The "must" is entailed by the fact that all brains share a common ancestry and common genes, and so there is only one basic way they work, that this necessarily has an axiomatic structure, that all higher animals share the same evolved psychology based on inclusive fitness, and in humans this is extended into a personality based on throat muscle contractions (language) that evolved to manipulate others (with variations that can be regarded as trivial). This book, and arguably all of W's work and all useful discussion of behavior is a development of or variation on these ideas.

Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016).  For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book  Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization  - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016  662p (2016).

All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. 

Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017)    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. 

  The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017)  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B.

Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017)    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX 

Suicide by Democracy: an Obituary for America and the World (2018) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQVWV9C

In this paper, we will try to take the problem of abrupt contingency and radical discontinuity seriously. We will firstly analyze some basic features of two of the best examples of philosophical lawless disruption, one taken from the Analytical tradition and the other from the Continental one. We will not give a complete account of these two thinkers, but we will show how they meet the traumatic and the contingent, the whyless and lawless. We will highlight their style of meeting a conceptual catastrophe and what useful elements we could deduce from their work.

At the end of our work, we will try to propose a possible solution to the problems raised by these two figures. In order to do so, we will analyze Zalamea’s synthetic philosophy and we will try to sketch how it could help us make sense of discontinuity and rupture, preventing us from slipping into absolute despair.

https://www.glass-bead.org/research-platform/my-words-to-saul-kripkenstein-above-the-village-of-milford/?lang=enview